What It Means to Be a Democrat

I got my first job at the age of fourteen, thanks to the natural tendency of grass to grow and the energy that comes with youth. One of our Mitchell, South Dakota, neighbors, Mrs. Truax, hired me to mow and edge her lawn and trim the front hedge. Mrs. Truax was a charming woman who demanded attention to detail. I must have met her standards, because by the end of the summer I got a 50 percent raise, leaping from ten to fifteen cents an hour. The next summer I developed a thriving business, commanding twenty-five cents an hour to weed gardens and cut grass for a dozen families around town. I don’t remember my parents ever giving me pocket money after I started high school.

My yard business taught me what the next seven decades of my life confirmed: there is no substitute for a good day’s work. A job puts food on a family’s table and shoes on their feet, pays mortgages and medical bills, and engages the mind and/or the body. It builds a sense of self-worth that is essential to one’s well-being. Even at my advanced age, I know I would be frustrated if I weren’t absorbed in various projects. Retirement for me has meant reducing my workdays from fourteen hours to twelve!

Contrast these pluses with the nearly 14 million jobless Americans (adding the two million more who are unemployed but have stopped applying for work), and one can begin to get a sense of the profound loss in earnings, opportunities, ego, and spirit that Americans have suffered since 2007, when the housing bubble burst and ushered in the Great Recession. These are difficult times.

No good Democrat wants our neighbors sitting at home, unable to earn an income by their own sweat or ingenuity. This is such a basic tenet that I would challenge anyone to disagree. The opportunity to make a living is the very foundation of America, no matter what political party one affiliates with.

But the stark fact, according to a report by the California Budget Project, is that there are four times as many people job hunting as there are positions to fill. The longer you’re unemployed, the less likely you are to get hired. It angers me that people eager to work are often treated no better than a carton of milk—as if they have a shelf life. Finding work is harder today because—besides our overall economic slowdown—millions of jobs have been shipped overseas, where labor is cheaper. It’s little wonder that in recent surveys a majority of Americans say they are feeling pessimistic about the future.

As a seven-year-old at the start of the Great Depression, I remember seeing the stricken faces of the bankers, store owners, and farmers who had lost their incomes and their property to bankruptcy and foreclosure. It was confusing to see grown-ups—who were in my mind all-powerful—unable to rescue themselves and their families. My father, a Wesleyan Methodist minister, was lucky: as long as God was in business, he stayed employed. The majority of women, including my mother, were homemakers, perhaps an even more exhausting job in those days before appliances. But suddenly fathers, the providers, were home too.

The Democratic Party I fell hard for did not tolerate unemployment. When Franklin Roosevelt took the oath of office in March 1933, he looked out on a national landscape in far worse shape than ours is now. FDR seized on the most powerful tool at his disposal—the federal government—to get the stalled economy moving. His largest and best-known solution was to create the Works Progress Administration, which, between 1935 and 1943, hired eight and half million people to build or improve our country’s public works.

The WPA is a prime example of win-win. People got steady paychecks that fed families, the nation’s economic engine, and the national hope that better days were coming. The United States got needed roads and airfields. Nearly every community boasted a new park, bridge, or school. The number of rural homes with electricity doubled. In my hometown, we got a beautiful new courthouse that we are still using with pride.

In true Democratic fashion, the WPA also acknowledged the value of the arts, hiring hundreds of actors, writers, painters, photographers, and historians. I’ve read that these creative types didn’t always appreciate having to clock into their government job at nine a.m. Nonetheless they produced some of our country’s most enduring works—murals in libraries and post offices, local histories and travel guides, and photographs that brought the destruction of the Depression home to the nation. Migrant Mother, Dorothea Lange’s 1936 photo of a woman at a California pea pickers’ camp, worry creasing her face, became the iconic image of the era.

In 2009, seventy-six years after Roosevelt entered the White House, our new president, Barack Obama, had barely changed out of his inaugural tuxedo before he got down to work the next day, pushing Congress for a stimulus bill to staunch the worst effects of the recession. I thought his first major piece of legislation, the $787 million American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, was the right approach. It helped keep teachers in classrooms, established electronic health care records, invested in green technology, and repaired roads and bridges, among many other initiatives. All told, it saved or created about three million jobs. It may have prevented the recession from becoming a depression; I only wish it had been even larger than it was—not smaller, as the act’s opponents advocated.

I don’t mean to be rude, but I do mean to be blunt: no one—conservative or liberal—is cheering the increased debt load. But had we not borrowed, our nation’s economy would have continued to careen downhill. The stimulus helped stabilize the country and lay the groundwork for a recovery, however fragile.

The problem, as I mentioned, is that the stimulus wasn’t large enough to yield a far-reaching, long-term effect. Now that the money has been spent, local governments have begun to shed jobs—so far, nearly a half million since their 2008 peak. In school districts across the country, superintendents have discarded extracurricular activities, cut back on classroom supplies, dismissed administrative staff, and frozen salaries. When that wasn’t enough, many schools had to fire their librarians to stave off even more difficult cuts, such as discontinuing full-day kindergarten. The end is not yet in sight.

Nor have states been exempt. The governors of New Jersey and Wisconsin have used their local budget crunches as an excuse to break up public sector labor unions. We Democrats ought to know better. We cannot expect our firefighters and police officers to put themselves in harm’s way for us and then steal their economic security.

As a South Dakotan, I am as thrifty as anyone I know. It is how my parents reared me. But had Congress been able to agree on a larger stimulus, my bet is that we would not be losing jobs now. And the problem, besides the soul-sapping aspects of being laid off, is that each person collecting unemployment means fewer dollars recycled back into the economy.

For all of the GOP’s faith in supply-side economics—lowering taxes to spur the economy by producing more goods and services (the approach popularized by Ronald Reagan and carried forth by George W. Bush)—the idea isn’t worth a hoot in a rain barrel. This Republican policy helped the wealthiest Americans squirrel away the money they saved in income taxes and capital gains taxes to become even wealthier. In 2007, the top 1 percent of U.S. households received tax cuts averaging $41,077, which lifted their after-tax incomes by 5.0 percent, according to the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center. And within the top 1 percent, households with incomes over $1 million received tax cuts averaging $114,000, resulting in an after-tax income jump of 5.7 percent. But the so-called trickle-down effect that supply-siders count on to create jobs never materialized.

It is past time for the supply-side myth to be replaced by something that works: demand-side economics. As in Franklin Roosevelt’s day, our party should push to supplement private employment with public efforts to expand the workforce—to spark consumer demand by putting money in people’s pockets. Unlike the wealthy, when the poor and middle class earn more, the money goes right back into the economy, spent on food, clothes, transportation, and other necessities. Greater demand causes the local grocery store chain to add another cashier, or the local Walmart another greeter. And with each new hire, the positive cycle begins again.

Here’s why I believe they are wrong. President Eisenhower, one of my heroes, initiated the Interstate Highway System (IHS) more than a half century ago. As the South Dakota State Democratic Party executive secretary in the mid-1950s, before the interstate system was completed, I remember how long it took me to drive from town to town on two-lane roads.

Today, freeways are such a part of American life that we rarely think of them as more than the route home for Thanksgiving. But the system the IHS built, primarily to allow military convoys to cross the country efficiently, is still “the economic engine that drives this country’s prosperity,” as American History magazine noted. With the dawn of what is sometimes called “Eisenhower’s autobahn,” American businesses were able to instantly expand their territory and increase their bottom lines. During its first forty years the Interstate spawned more than seven million jobs and bumped up the nation’s productivity by 25 percent. Every dollar spent on highway construction generates six dollars in return. The existence of freeways has allowed millions of Americans to buy homes in the suburbs and commute to work.

Fast trains would do for the nation in the twenty-first century what the Interstate Highway System did in the twentieth. I have been advocating such a rail system for forty years. A study by the nonpartisan U.S. PIRG (the federation of state Public Interest Research Groups) shows that no matter how successful the IHS has been, money spent today on public transportation creates twice as many jobs as funds spent on highways. And the benefits would be immediate, since one in five of the nation’s unemployed is a laid-off construction worker. Shuttered plants could be retrofitted to build and maintain new locomotives and cars, creating manufacturing jobs. Engineers would be needed to grade new routes. We would require conductors, operators, ticket takers, and repair people. The ripples would spread far and wide.

China, Japan, and Europe have long relied on bullet trains that run at 200 miles per hour, while the United States merely chugs along behind them. Contrast the top speed for most U.S. trains—regular passenger trains run at 59 miles per hour—with high-speed trains (defined as anything above 160 miles per hour) on new track. Such an interconnected system would dramatically reduce traffic congestion, decrease the number of highway injuries and fatalities, and prolong the life spans of our roadways. Fewer drivers would mean cutting greenhouse gases and dialing back our dependence on gasoline. An easy commute would encourage suburban home buying, help stabilize home values, and lower the transportation costs for many. By spending fewer hours behind the wheel, commuters would be more productive—or even gain much-sought family or relaxation time.

I am baffled by the shortsightedness of the Republican governors of Florida, Ohio, and Wisconsin who turned away federal money their states had won for high-speed rail projects. Governor Rick Scott of Florida rejected $2.4 billion, which would have nearly paid for the nation’s first bullet train between Orlando and Tampa. His fear was that the train would somehow become a costly “boondoggle.” With it he returned approximately 20,000 temporary and permanent jobs for his constituents at a time when the state unemployment rate was 12.5 percent. He gave up a high-speed train that could, one day, be part of a coast-to-coast network—a train that could serve commuters and encourage tourists. As a part-time Florida resident, I have heard both Republican and Democratic Florida voters say that Scott will be a one-term governor. One can only hope.

A high-speed train network is admittedly a huge project. But there are also thousands of comparatively smaller, essential public works jobs that need tackling. The broken levees after Hurricane Katrina that resulted in the flooding of New Orleans in 2005; the bursting of the Kaloko Reservoir dam in Kauai, Hawaii, in 2006; and the rush-hour collapse of the Interstate 35W Bridge in downtown Minneapolis in 2007 are a few high-profile disasters that likely could have been prevented if we had properly cared for our nation’s infrastructure. That’s just the start. According to the U.S. Department of Transportation, a quarter of our 600,000 bridges need repairs, and our substandard roads are “a significant factor” in one-third of the 43,000 auto fatalities each year. Our power grids are struggling to keep up with increased energy demands. As Donald F. Kettl, dean of the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland, put it, “Much of America is being held together with Scotch tape, baling wire, and prayers.”

We have put these tasks off just as many homeowners do; maintenance is costly and unglamorous. There always seem to be more pressing needs. But of course delaying these long-overdue projects eventually costs us even more. Today, our fixer-upper of a country cannot operate at full capacity. This is the right moment to repair the metaphorical leaky roof and, in the process, give more out-of-work people a paycheck.

Besides outright job creation, there are other critical steps we ought to be taking to reduce the unemployment rolls. By some estimates, fully a quarter of our joblessness is due to structural unemployment, a mismatch between workers and openings. A 2010 report by the Hamilton Project and the Center for American Progress indicates that in this information age, many middle-class Americans possess outmoded skills. But that alone doesn’t account for the misalignment. A 2009 National Association of Manufacturers survey indicated that a third of companies lacked qualified scientists and engineers. With the economy operating below capacity, now is the time to invest in job training programs and additional education to help workers retool. While many Democrats in Congress understand this, there aren’t enough votes to save the U.S. Department of Labor’s job training programs from the House Republicans’ budget ax. But I believe this is a case where the government shouldn’t have to bear the full burden. Journalist Robert Samuelson has urged American companies to be “a little bolder,” to “make a small gamble that, by providing more training for workers, they might actually do themselves and the country some good.” I agree. The past several decades have been marked by disloyalty on the part of companies and employees. It is high time to revive and strengthen the compact that traditionally bound business and workers.

Here are a few suggestions that would advance this cause: raising the minimum wage from $7.75 to $8.25 an hour would result in an almost instant payoff. The fifty-cent hourly increase would give some 10 million workers a raise, thereby flushing more money into the economy. Although naysayers argue that even a small bump in wages cuts into job creation, in fact the opposite is true, according to Heidi Shierholz, an economist with the nonpartisan Economic Policy Institute: an increase could generate 50,000 new jobs.

Let me give you an example: when Bill Clinton signed the Family and Medical Leave Act into law in 1993, it was the first time mothers and fathers of a premature infant, people nursing a partner with cancer, or someone caring for a parent in last-stage dementia did not have to choose between shortchanging a loved one and holding on to the job that kept the family in food and health insurance. Employees can now take off twelve weeks to care for immediate family or for themselves, without pay, but with the promise that their job, or a similar position, will be available when they return. They retain benefits but pay their share. Small businesses are exempt, as the act applies only to employers with fifty or more workers living within seventy-five miles of their workplace. The cost to the employer is minimal. But for employees, already stretched and stressed, it is a blessing.

Nonetheless our work-family policies still lag far behind our industrialized counterparts. Between 1979 and 2006, the average American middle-class family’s workweek lengthened by eleven hours. Think of all their children’s soccer games American parents have missed! I wasn’t around for a lot of my daughters’ and son’s growing-up years, and I regret it to this day. You do not get the time back.

America’s work ethic is such that we toil longer hours than people in most other developed countries, including Japan, where, the Center for American Progress’s Joan C. Williams and Heather Boushey note, “there’s a word, karoshi, for ‘death by overwork.’” At a minimum, most European Union countries set the workweek below forty hours and guarantee a certain number of fully subsidized sick days. Of the thirty nations in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the United States alone does not guarantee paid maternity leave. And child care subsidies here, limited to the poor, are spotty at best. Given all these challenges, it’s no wonder that, according to Williams and Boushey, 90 percent of American mothers and 95 percent of fathers say they experience work-family conflict.

In 1960, when I was a U.S. congressman, I was the breadwinner for our rollicking family of seven, and Eleanor stayed home to take care of our children, as 80 percent of mothers did. Today, this number has nearly flipped: 70 percent of American children live in homes where both parents work. Even so, salaries for lower- and middle-income Americans have not kept pace. The Economic Policy Institute reports that over the past thirty years, 34.6 percent of all U.S. income growth has gone to the top one-tenth of one percent of earners. In contrast, the bottom 90 percent of earners has seen only 15.9 percent growth. Think about that. The widening salary gap between U.S. CEOs and average workers is a demoralizing force. According to the AFL-CIO’s Executive PayWatch, in 2010 the average chief executive of a Standard & Poor’s Fortune 500 company earned $11.4 million. This eight-figure salary equals the paychecks of 28 U.S. presidents, 225 teachers, or 753 minimum-wage earners.

Another trend in the workplace is a significant drop in union membership, to the deafening applause of conservatives, who believe that unions drag our economy down. Today only 12 percent of American employees belong to a labor union, compared to about one-third between 1947 and 1973. But during those years, U.S. economic output tripled, growing at a rate of 3.8 percent a year, compared to 2.2 percent since 2001. And as membership has dropped, so has the share of income going to the American middle class.

Devaluing the hard work of the average person has become a systemic—and distressing—national problem. Preoccupied by job insecurity, stagnant salaries, and the need to care for their families in a hostile work environment, Americans cannot possibly focus on the greater good. You can’t worry about clean air or water, better energy policies, or national education standards when you’re wrapped up in gnawing questions over how to make a living, pay the mortgage, and afford this week’s groceries.

As conscientious parents, we guide our children. We lay out the blueprint for success. We underscore our values until they are (we hope) absorbed. We tell them as our parents taught us: Admit your mistakes. Follow the Golden Rule. Work hard and you will be rewarded. Respect your elders. Be kind. Do the job right. Don’t cheat. If you hurt someone, apologize. Share. It pays to be honest. The American Dream is attainable for everyone.

But I worry about my grandchildren’s and great-grandchildren’s generations. They have every reason to question the old adages. Pop culture delivers the message that getting ahead and work are unrelated. It is possible to be famous for being famous. Corporations let them know that the big guys always win. Parents can work hard for decades and then be dropped with no severance, while the CEO takes home multimillion-dollar bonuses. It is hard to climb the ladder when the rungs are missing. It is easy to believe that the key to success is ruthless selfishness.